Call for Papers

This conference, scheduled to take place during the 2016 European Championship and hosted by the University of Basel's Department of English, takes up soccer with a special focus on its poetics and aesthetics. The conference particularly seeks to scrutinize the poetics and aesthetics of the game in light of comparative, transnational, transcontinental, and global perspectives. In doing so, it aims to shed light on the poetics and aesthetics of all aspects of soccer, from the actual game to fan chants and choreographies, from representations in the arts to the aesthetics of media coverage, from the poetics of live commentary to institutional image cultivation (FIFA, UEFA, MLS etc.), from video gaming to aspects of design (jerseys, stadia). Given this range and diversity of the forms in which the poetics and aesthetics of soccer manifest themselves, the conference by necessity is interdisciplinary in nature, with contributions coming from fields such as literary and cultural studies, philosophy, linguistics, visual studies and the arts, design, and anthropology to name but a few.